The Campaign

Jason Sudeikis and Will Ferrell in "The Campaign."Credit
Warner Brothers Pictures

“The Campaign” is a comedy about a North Carolina Congressional election. Since it stars Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis as rival candidates — you probably know this if you own a television — the movie is obviously not a realistic depiction of the American electoral process. But its relationship to the reality of contemporary politics is nonetheless interesting to consider. Too soft and silly to be satire, too upbeat to be a cautionary tale, the film (directed by Jay Roach) is a fun-house fable that both exaggerates and understates the absurdities of our democracy in this contentious election year.

You can chuckle at the buffoonery, raise your eyebrows at the baroque scatological and sexual humor — Mom, they said “penis” again! — and conclude that “The Campaign” goes too far. Mr. Ferrell does his rabid frat-boy thing; Mr. Galifianakis does his deranged baby-man thing; and there may be comfort in the thought that the American people would never elect clowns like these to any office. But then a glance at some of the clowns we do elect, perhaps especially to our national legislature, might lead you in the opposite direction. Really, the movie could not possibly go far enough unless the screenwriters (Chris Henchy and Shawn Harwell) had abandoned all invention and transcribed the script directly from C-Span.

And so “The Campaign” wobbles between the vaguely topical and the completely preposterous. The villains are a pair of fraternal billionaires called the Motch brothers, played with brandy-swilling, cigar-wielding relish by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd. They have been the enthusiastic backers of Cam Brady (Mr. Ferrell), a blow-dried Democrat who is both a Blue Dog and a tomcat, espousing a vague platform of guns, God and family while violating his marriage vows at every opportunity.

But now tired of him and eager to fast-track a rotten deal with their Chinese business partners, the Motches recruit Marty Huggins (Mr. Galifianakis), the sweet, wimpy son of a legendary local politico, to run against Cam.

Daddy Huggins (Brian Cox) wearily gives his blessing. A black-suited Motch hatchet man named Tim Wattley (Dylan McDermott) is dispatched to make Marty, who runs a small-town tourist office and dotes on his pet pugs, into a mean (“lean” not being in the physiological cards) political fighting machine. (Wattley’s counterpart in the Brady camp is played by a grinning, unusually bland Jason Sudeikis.) It is not an easy transformation because Marty is squeaky-voiced, easily flustered and just a wife (Sarah Baker) and two sons (Grant Goodman and Kya Haywood) away from being an egregious gay stereotype.

He is, however, persuasively North Carolinian (it is Mr. Galifianakis’s home state), though not altogether convincingly Republican. But in a movie like this, with all its pseudo-naughty provocations about body parts and functions, and its occasional forays into misogyny and ethnic and regional caricature, the real taboo is partisanship.

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From left, Dan Aykroyd, John Lithgow, Brian Cox and Josh Lawson.

Though some literal-minded conservatives might object to the implied parallel between the Motch brothers and the real-life Koch brothers, it should be noted that the movie’s scheming plutocrats represent a plague-on-both-your houses gag. They are happy to buy politicians from either party, as long as their mercenary interests are protected. And while it is possible to interpret “The Campaign” as a brief for campaign finance reform, the script is also careful to note, late in the game, that Citizens United is the law of the land.

My point is that the movie, which is sometimes very funny in the usual zany, pop-surrealist sketch-comedy manner, is studiously inoffensive and thoroughly chicken-hearted. Punching a baby — a bit featured in the trailers — is shockingly funny but not exactly brave. The film’s timidity places it squarely in a tradition of Hollywood anti-political comedy that has flourished at least since Mr. Smith went to Washington.

American politics is inherently divisive: it is one of the ways we express our resentment, even our hatred, of one another without resorting to violence. Movies, in contrast, are where we can unite in our hatred of politics and allow ourselves to dwell in a fantasy republic where the common good is served, corruption is vanquished, and reason prevails.

Video

TimesCast Politics | Jay Roach Interview

The Times’s Jeremy W. Peters talks to the director Jay Roach about parodying the political trail in the Will Ferrell movie “The Campaign.”

“The Campaign” does what it can to deliver on this fantasy, or at least to distract the audience from painful truths that might shatter it altogether. It’s like a sober, centrist, irrelevant op-ed column, but with bad words and belly laughs.

A few easy satirical targets are squarely hit in all the scattershot riffing. The movie effectively lampoons the emptiness of patriotic symbolism and the way politicians manufacture patently false images of authenticity for themselves, and it also tweaks the news media’s breathless coverage of manufactured scandal.

Cam’s platform consists of a smiling family and three words — “America, Jesus, Freedom” — and he seems secure in the assumption that his cheerful vacuity and aggressiveness will win him a fifth term. Actual television personalities like Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews and Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough show up to chuckle about the craziness of the Brady-Huggins race, which includes a combination attack ad-sex tape.

We’ve never seen anything like that before, one of the talking heads remarks. But we have seen, and will see, much worse before the votes are counted in November. The message of “The Campaign” is that, in the end, everything will be all right because, as long as we can have a good time laughing at a movie like this one, everything must be all right to begin with. I guess I approve of that message. I wish I could believe it.